I saw my face on gigantic billboards. Or rather, half my face; the lower half belonged to a yellow Tweenie. They had asked for my permission, but I didn't know what a Tweenie was
It wasn't exactly a hardship to leave London. Not merely because I was coming to Cape Town, but because everywhere I went in London, I saw, like some horrible hallucinogenic manifestation, my face peering out at me from gigantic billboards. Or rather, half my face; the lower half belonged to a yellow Tweenie, and together we were advertising a new BBC package of digital channels. The people who made the trail, a technically ground-breaking piece of work starring Stephen Berkoff and various other familiar faces, asked my permission first, but since I didn't know what a Tweenie was, I said yes. The result was like a wrinkled, white-haired whale on acid. The trail was directed by Tim Pope, freshly back from Hollywood, and was filmed by the cameraman from Shakespeare in Love. The real star of the shoot was a huge computerised camera, which swooped around us as we each ripped off an imaginary mask to reveal another face beneath. The key to it all lay, as ever, in post-production. I went to a creaky building off Regent Street to see the magic that was being done with computers to extraordinarily fierce deadlines: for every week the process would take in Hollywood, the BBC, tight-wadded as ever, allowed only a day.
I came to Cape Town to record an interview with the Afrikaner writer and academic Andre Brink for a programme I present for BBC News 24 and BBC World. We wandered along the front at Seapoint, with Robben Island out to our left and expensive blocks of flats, like Eastbourne in the sunshine, to our right. In the old days, Brink was persecuted and threatened for his opposition to apartheid; now he, like most left-wing Afrikaner intellectuals, feels badly let down. They think that, under Thabo Mbeki, the ANC has turned into a machine for perpetuating itself in power; and that unlike Nelson Mandela, who still goes out of his way to draw Afrikaners into the new South Africa, Mbeki is tacitly encouraging the destruction of their language and culture.
Even so, eight years after the handover of power, merely being here continues to feel good. I was the BBC correspondent in South Africa during the worst days of apartheid, and nothing today - not even the high crime rate - can spoil the sense of liberation. In the rest of South Africa, the rate of increase in violent crime is dropping; it is still going up here in Cape Town, though you'd never know it from walking down the street. But the vanishing of the Jewish delicatessens that were once such a feature of the old Seapoint hints at the process of white emigration.
When I worked in South Africa, everybody used to say the Afrikaners were here to stay because they had nowhere else to go; now, it seems to me, you can hear those familiar vowel sounds in every doctor's and dentist's rooms you go to in England, and half of all the security officers in London seem to be large, firm-jawed, blond-haired characters from the veld. South African friends of mine who escaped to London from their banning orders under the old regime used to prefer to keep their nationality quiet. Now a South African passport is even more popular around the world than Canadian or Irish ones, and there are pubs called "The Springbok" in every English-speaking country.
The press here quotes the giant diamond company De Beers as threatening to take legal action against one of the best and most dedicated of charities, Survival International, because it continues to link De Beers with the ethnic cleansing of the San Bushmen from the Central Kalahari in Botswana. I went to the Kalahari in August, and saw for myself how the Botswana government has moved the great majority of San people out of the Central Kalahari, and has cut off water to the few dozen who insisted on staying on their traditional land by destroying the few wells. Using thirst as a weapon in the desert would be most people's definition of remarkable cruelty.
Survival International believes the Botswana government wants to get the Bushmen out of the Central Kalahari because there are diamonds there; hence its campaign against De Beers, which shares the diamond rights in Botswana with the Botswana government. Personally, I am not convinced; I think the initiative comes from the government itself, which has an instinctive dislike of the intricate and ancient San culture, much as many western European governments have an instinctive dislike of "gypsies" and travellers. What is certain, though, is that De Beers wields immense influence over Botswana. Shouldn't it use that influence to reverse a historic evil - the effective destruction of the San in Botswana - rather than threatening one of the few organisations that is campaigning on their behalf?
The last thing I did before coming to Cape Town was to record an interview for Ruby Wax's new television show. The other guest was Michael Moore, the author of Stupid White Men and star of a one-man show at the Roundhouse in London: a large, rumpled, witty character who captured the audience's enthusiastic imagination. He was a delight: and, even better, a reminder that we shouldn't assume every American supports President Bush in his determination to bomb Iraq to democracy and replace Saddam Hussein with General Tommy Franks.
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